The results of yesterday's midterm election defy hot takes and easy narratives. On one level -- in terms of just how overwhelmingly voters, in raw numbers, voted Democratic and/or anti-Republican -- it was a Democratic wave of historic proportions. The sort of wave which puts to lie the common Republican and media talking point that America is "a center-right nation." No, in terms of the sentiment of the people of this country as of November 6, 2018, it is certainly not.

That sentiment was clearly blunted in terms of results, however. Given that massive lean towards Democrats in overall vote totals, fair elections would have given them far more than a majority of a couple of dozen House seats. Indeed, in the past, a lean like we saw last night typically has given the majority party twice as much if not more of a gain in the House. That that's all Democrats got is clear evidence that Republicans' craven agenda of gerrymandering has benefitted them greatly.

But while that's disappointing -- and while a few specific, notable races did not go in Democrats' favor -- there is no way whatsoever to honestly spin last night's results as good for Republicans or bad for Democrats. To do so requires one to lose sight of how political tides turn in a lasting way in this country, just how badly things have gotten over the past several years and just how much work it takes, and was always going to take, to effect real change.

Anti-democratic forces and illiberalism did not spring up, fully formed, with Donald Trump's election in November 2016. As I have written many, many times in this space, we have experienced years and years of these corrosive trends. Just as Republicans' program of court-packing, tax cuts, deregulation and disinvestment in our nation's future has taken decades to bear the rotten fruit it is now bearing, so too has the erosion of campaign finance laws, the evisceration of the Voting Rights Act and the enactment of widespread gerrymandering. Republicans began making it their explicit agenda to deconstruct civil society, to benefit and protect the powerful and to cast the vulnerable aside in the 1960s, accelerated these efforts in the 1980s and accelerated them even more in the years since the 1994 Contract with America election. They likewise made it their agenda to rig elections many, many years ago. That agenda was not going to be stopped in a single midterm election.

That agenda was, however, chipped at in real and substantive ways last night:

Winning the House, be it by 23 or 43 seats, is a big deal. Trump no longer has a rubber stamp in Congress and there is now a chance to enact some meaningful oversight of his administration's negligence and corruption. Every day, it seems, there is a new nightmare coming out of the Trump administration. Much of it is a function of there having been absolutely no pushback on it by the supposed coequal branch of government that is Congress. There will now, finally, be at least some pushback;

While the overall number of legislative pickups was smaller than hoped, the composition of those pickups is important. Congress and many statehouses are now younger and more diverse than they ever have been. We elected women in historic numbers. We elected Native Americans. We elected LBGTQ candidates. We elected true progressives, the sort of which we have not had in prominent positions in this country in a long, long time and in some cases ever. Legislative realities make quantity matter more than anything, but do not sell quality short;

Several states enacted election reforms and anti-gerrymandering measures last night and some -- most notably Michigan -- made sweeping reforms in this respect. Between that and several state legislatures either being fully flipped or turning sharply Democratic, we are far closer to a time when our elections are fair and democratic this morning than we were yesterday morning;

People are understandably focusing on the unfortunate results in races that got the most ink over the past year -- the gubernatorial races in Georgia and Florida, the Senate races in Florida and Texas and a handful of races involving high-profile figures on the national stage -- and are despairing. It's probably worth noting, however, that the races that got the most ink did so, in part, because they were Republican strongholds to begin with that were made shockingly competitive. If I told you two years ago that a Democratic Senate candidate in Texas would finish just two points behind Ted Cruz, you would have assumed something major and monumental happened. That that candidate did not win is unfortunate, but it does not mean that something major and monumental did not happen;

It's also worth noting that some of the high profile races did go Democrats' way. Maybe the offices aren't quite as big, but seeing America's most notorious vote-suppressor, Kris Kobach, lose in Kansas and seeing Scott Walker, an anti-worker tool of the Koch Brothers, lose in Wisconsin, has certainly put a spring in my step this morning and it should put a spring in yours.

It took years for Republicans to bugger up this country and a handful of big time superhero candidates were not going to fly in and fix things in a single night. Do not lose sight of the fact, however, that a lot of street level superheroes are starting to get results. In the past two years a hell of a lot of people have done the work to start the process of fixing things. They have knocked on doors, registered voters, and have persuaded millions that there is a better course than the course our nation has been on for so long. That work paid off in many, many positive ways last night, even if it did not do so in 100% optimum ways.

It's easy to break things. It's way harder to fix them. You do so by putting your head down and doing that work. Continuing that work. You make some progress in 2018 and you make more progress in 2020. You win some elections. You take stock, get back to work and then you win some more in 2022, 2024 and beyond. The work is never done. But if the work is done right it can pay off, slowly, over time.

For three years, Donald Trump has courted and enjoyed the support of the "alt-right," which is a euphemism for white supremacists, anti-Semites and neo-Nazis. They played a very large role in his election, with their temporary, barely sanitized public image providing putatively respectable cover for base racism, anti-Semitism and fascism.

We are what we do and what Donald Trump has done is well-documented. Our president is a white supremacist. Our president is an anti-Semite. Our president has no problem with political violence as long as it is used as a weapon against those he calls his enemies. This is not an opinion, it is documented fact. Our nation is under attack from white supremacist terrorism, our president has done nothing to even remotely condemn it, let alone do anything about it. To the contrary he has encouraged it. As such, our president bears a large amount of moral responsibility for it.

To suggest otherwise is to be willfully ignorant of history.

To suggest otherwise is to be willfully ignorant of how political, racial and religious violence is fostered and inspired.

To suggest otherwise is to be willfully blind to that which is going on before our very eyes.

​To suggest otherwise is to be complicit in the ugliness and horror which has overtaken this country.

An awful lot of journalists were fired between 2015-17 because their companies went with a "video strategy" influenced strongly by Facebook's claimed video ad revenues and Facebook's direct encouragement of their media partners to pivot to video and away from a written product.

That didn't pan out the way anyone expected, however. Video engagement was far lower than expected and revenues followed suit. As a result of all of this a lot of video editors and producers were fired, joining their print journalism colleagues on the unemployment line. Online media, in many respects, is a flaming hole in the ground at the moment.

Why did the video strategy -- which Facebook claimed was the Way and the Truth -- not pan out?

Facebook knew by January 2015 that its video-ad metrics had problems, and understood the nature of the issue within a few months, but sat on that information for more than a year, the plaintiffs claimed in an amended complaint Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Oakland . . . Facebook in 2016 revealed the metrics problem, saying it had “recently discovered” it. The firm told some advertisers that it had probably overestimated the average time spent watching video ads by 60 percent to 80 percent. Tuesday’s filing alleged that Facebook had instead inflated average ad-watching time by 150 percent to 900 percent.

To be clear: the current state of affairs in online media is largely the fault of media companies for desperately and stupidly chasing trends that even a moment's reflection should've revealed were idiotic (note: NO ONE prefers video news content online over print), but it sure as shit doesn't help that Facebook, allegedly, was lying to everyone about user behavior and ad revenues.​

​The premise is not a bad one: "We're all in this together! What's good for my brother is good for me! Shared prosperity makes life better for everyone and brings forth harmony and not division!" It's a riff on Alexander Hamilton's understanding of what our nation was and could be.

​I'm not the biggest Alexander Hamilton fan in the world but, generally speaking, I agree with that stuff. Shared prosperity is important, as is our sense of community as a nation.

​There are just a couple of problems, though:

Nowhere in the column does the author acknowledge that contemporary conservatism aggressively champions economic policies that are massively exploitative and comically unequal;

Nowhere does the author acknowledge that, whenever someone proposes something that may make economic prosperity a more mutual and less exclusive thing, his colleagues at the National Review and likeminded places decry it as "socialism" or worse and claim it will be the ruin of the country; and

Nowhere does the author note that conservative policy treats billionaires as if they were godlike geniuses, gives preferential tax treatment to the shiftless children of the rich, allows businesses to poison the populace, fights minimum wage at every turn, approaches health care as if it were a mere privilege, assumes the poor are poor because they lack moral fiber and, in every other respect, works overtime to impede the very mutual economic gain which he claims to be championing rather than promote it.

My conservative friends: there is absolutely nothing wrong with believing that "mutual economic gain is the keystone of The Union." If you do believe that, however, try advancing at least a single, solitary economic initiative that promotes mutual economic gain as opposed to the massive number of policies you support which serves the interests of business and the wealthy alone, does harm to the poor and to working people and fosters vast and, eventually, destabilizing economic inequality.

Until you do that, you're spewing empty ideology which flies in the face of the reality which you conservatives have created.

My aim in writing that story was to bring to light a dark chapter of American history the specifics of which had been long-buried, but the reverberations of which have lived on for 120 years. History has whitewashed the Wilmington Massacre itself, but a direct result of the massacre was full and thorough ushering in of the Jim Crow era, the effects of which are still felt socially and economically to this day. What's more, many of those responsible for Wilmington -- while having their crimes either excused or forgotten -- went on to fame, fortune, greatness and, in the case of Kenan, were immortalized in monuments to their memory.

When I wrote that story, I hoped that it would start a conversation that might lead to a greater awareness of just how much of modern American society rests on a foundation created by slaveowners and white supremacists. I hoped that, eventually, someone might ask whether or not a giant college football stadium, for example, should stand as a memorial to a guy like William Rand Kenan Sr.

UNC-Chapel Hill will change the name on a plaque at Kenan Memorial Stadium to distance the university from William Rand Kenan Sr., who was involved in the Wilmington racial violence of 1898. The plaque on the stadium will be altered to honor William Rand Kenan Jr., Kenan Sr.’s son . . . . . . The story of Kenan Sr.’s involvement in the 1898 massacre has been in the news lately, since the controversy over the toppled Silent Sam Confederate monument on UNC’s campus. It was featured in a piece published last month by NBC sports reporter Craig Calcaterra, who wrote that the elder Kenan was the commander of “a white supremacist paramilitary force which massacred scores of black residents of Wilmington, North Carolina on a single, bloody day in 1898.”

While it's being couched as merely changing the plaque, the fact is that the place is "Memorial" stadium, with said memorial being the plaque. If you change who is being memorialized I think it's fair to say that, technically speaking, you are changing the name of the stadium. Or certainly the purpose of its name.

I likewise think that while changing the memorial to Kenan's son is something of a cute move by the university -- no new signs or letterhead or anything else needs to be ordered -- it is, in this case, significant enough.

As the university's chancellor noted in her official statement on the matter, the son -- William Rand Kenan Jr. -- is a far more important figure for the university. His multi-million dollar bequest to the university in the 1960s led to a $300 million+ foundation that continues to benefit the university in countless ways. While some of his money was, in fact, family money inherited from the Kenan's slave owning past, it was only a small fraction of it, earned at least a couple of generations before him. He built the vast majority of it through his work as an industrialist and inherited a great deal more through his sister who had married the oil man Henry Flagler who predeceased her.

To be sure, the slave holding past of the Kenans is significant and should be noted by the university (efforts are being made to do this) and, as I wrote in my story, Kenan Jr., like so many men of his time, chose to overlook and minimize what happened in Wilmington specifically and in America at large. They should not be absolved of that. It's the case, however, that Kenan Jr. was born after the Civil War, was not involved in Wilmington and does not have any documented history of active participation in white supremacist organizations, white supremacist history or white supremacist acts. Yeah, I realize that's a pretty low bar when it comes to memorializing someone, but in light of that and in light of his undeniable impact on the university during his lifetime and in the decades since his death, it does not strike me as inappropriate to memorialize him if UNC thinks it appropriate. Especially given that the alternative would be either keeping the current monument to a murderer or mounting a long and 100% certain-to-fail challenge to get any reference to the Kenans removed from the stadium.

Being satisfied with the move from Kenan Sr. to Kenan Jr. is not just a matter of pragmatism, however. I think there's a benefit to be had in doing it this way.

As a result of the removal of the current monument and the stadium's re-dedication, the university is committing to working with UNC's "history task force," which is charged with contextualizing the university's past. If they were to simply change the name of the place to "Tar Heel Stadium" it'd be pretty easy to paper over the Kenans and their history and pretend it never happened. By changing it to William Rand Kenan Jr., one holds out hope that there will be a bit more room, in the new memorial, to explain both his history and the history of the stadium's name change. That's what "contextualization" is, after all. William Rand Kenan Sr.'s actions in Wilmington were completely and utterly unknown by almost everyone before now. By keeping it Kenan, it'll be a lot harder to bury that uncomfortable history.

And that should make everyone happy, right? So many people who dislike the revisiting of our country's slave-owning and white supremacist past decry that to do so is to "erase" history. They should be pleased then, because this does the exact opposite. It brings history that had been intentionally obscured by darkness back into the light.

Good job, UNC. You have a long way to go to fully contend with your past, but at least in this instance you got it right.

​​The story surrounds the claims of Kavanaugh's college classmate, Deborah Ramirez, who says that Kavanaugh exposed himself to her. Her claims were first made public in an article in The New Yorker in late September. Kavanaugh claimed under oath that the first time he heard of her claims was in the New Yorker story, which he suggested blindsided him and which he characterized as "an orchestrated hit to take me out.”

The NBC story claims, however, that based on text messages exchanged between Kavanaugh, his nomination/legal team and old colleges friends, Kavanaugh and/or his surrogates were working behind the scenes to head off Ramirez's allegations at least two months before the New Yorker story broke:

Further, the texts show Kavanaugh may need to be questioned about how far back he anticipated that Ramirez would air allegations against him. Berchem says in her memo that Kavanaugh “and/or” his friends “may have initiated an anticipatory narrative” as early as July to “conceal or discredit” Ramirez.

Kavanaugh told the Senate Judiciary Committee under oath that the first time he heard of Ramirez’s allegation was in the Sept. 23 article in The New Yorker.

​Kavanaugh was asked by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, when he first heard of Ramirez’s allegations. Kavanaugh answered: “In the New Yorker story.”

​If he and/or those working with him were trying to get people's stories straight about Ramirez's allegations in July it was, quite simply, a lie for him to say last week that the first he heard about those allegations was in the New Yorker story. A lie aimed at hiding the fact that he knew of a serious allegation beforehand and suggesting that an effort to suppress the allegation -- to craft "an anticipatory narrative" -- was undertaken. This would stand as a lie, by the way, irrespective of the truth of Ramirez's claims.

If the text message bear this out -- and all it would require would be for them to show that, at some point before the New Yorker story, Kavanaugh and/or his team were texting people talking about Ramirez's allegations with at least some degree of specificity -- there is no defense for his testimony last week. It will stand as perjury and it should be disqualifying. ​More than that, it's the sort of thing that, in almost any other circumstance, would cause his state bar to investigate him with the eye toward a license suspension or disbarment.

Yet, it still seems, Republicans will attempt to ram him through and onto the Supreme Court.

I came from a couple of small and disadvantaged towns that did not have some prefabricated assembly line of future leaders. The people who came from those places and who did, in fact, accomplish things did so because they sought to transcend geography or race or socio-economic status or family history. They had to. They needed to break the mold of their surroundings or their ancestry in order to do good things in life because falling into the common expectations and routines of their environment meant doing less than they aspired to do.

Later, when I went to college and especially when I went to law school, I began to encounter Brett Kavanaugh types. The ones I met were angrier and jerkier than most because George Washington was their safety school and they were disappointing dad by not getting into Yale, but they were of that mold. A lot of them, actually, came from Bethesda and prep-school-laden suburbs like them.

I never heard of Brett Kavanaugh until recently, but I've spent my entire adult life thinking about guys like him. The ones for whom trying to transcend anything would be bad for them rather than good, because everything had been set up for them to succeed and they had better not fuck that up.

Most of them did succeed, of course, but almost all of them are boring, average and pathetic people, no matter their station, wealth or power. Pathetic because they never had to do a damn thing. Because they never once, in their entire lives, had to dream or to work particularly hard. Because they did not, in fact, ever consider the possibility of doing so.

As an attorney with 11 years of trial experience, I found Christine Ford's testimony about her alleged attempted rape by Brett Kavanaugh to be convincing and compelling. Any lawyer with even half that experience would, if they were not being nakedly partisan, agree.

Contrary to what random people on the Internet will tell you, this is not a matter of everyone's opinion being of fair and equal weight. Experienced legal practitioners know that there are basic criteria for what makes a witness believable. Ford met virtually all of them. If a lawyer tells you otherwise, they are lying for partisan reasons.

I'm less interested this morning in her credibility, however, and more interested in the credibility of Brett Kavanaugh. Based on yesterday's hearing that, likewise, should be pretty uncontroversial. He's a liar. He lied repeatedly about things big and small, both yesterday and while under oath several years ago. To wit: ​

During his 2004 confirmation hearings for a seat on the D.C. Circuit, Kavanaugh was asked about his role as a White House staffer in the effort to get judge William Pryor confirmed for a different appeals court seat. He lied about that;

​He lied about his involvement in and knowledge of the “Memogate” scandal of 2001-2003 in which two Republican staffers gained unauthorized access to the private computer files of six Democratic senators regarding judicial nominees;

​He almost certainly lied about his knowledge of the bad acts of his former boss and mentor, the disgraced judge Alex Kozinski, whose sexual harassment and the distribution of sexually-explicit material to his friends and employees was "legendary" among those who knew him or worked for him;

During yesterday's hearing he testified that he did not watch Christine Ford's testimony. That was a lie.

​He clearly lied about the meaning of the “Renate Alumni” reference in his high school yearbook, which was an act of crude slut-shaming he now laughably contends was benign;

He likewise lied about crude slang also included in his high school yearbook, trying to make sexual innuendo that was more than questionable at the time and simply unacceptable in polite company now into something it clearly was not;

He lied that a reference to throwing up during notoriously booze-filled high school trips to the beach was about eating spicy food when it was clearly about binge-drinking;

​He lied multiple times when he claimed that witnesses "refuted" Christine Ford's stories. One of those witnesses, in fact, says she believes Ford's allegations against Kavanaugh. He mischaracterized her testimony -- overstating it in misleading fashion -- in a way that, were this an actual trial, could quite possibly lead to perjury charges;

He likewise lied when he claimed his high school friend Mark Judge offered an “affidavit under threat of perjury” to support his side of the story. Judge's statement was an unsworn one in a letter signed by his lawyer, consisting of no testimonial weight whatsoever. Judge, as I noted yesterday, has gone into hiding and Republicans refused to call him as a witness;

Multiple senators questioned Kavanaugh about his drinking habits, both as a teenager and in the present, prompting awkward and telling exchanges, silences, dodges and deflections. It is plain to anyone with any familiarity with drinking and drinkers that he was lying about his history and experience with alcohol.

Some of these matters may seem, in isolation, to be trivial. In context, however, they are anything but. The sort of person Brett Kavanaugh was as a high school student has direct bearing on the very serious and heinous act of which he is being accused and his lies about such matters -- his drinking, his attitude toward and treatment of women -- have a direct bearing on his credibility. That he would blatantly lie about such matters is damning and utterly destroys the credibility of his denials. While there is not enough evidence to bring criminal sexual assault charges against Kavanaugh, there is plenty of reason to believe he lied repeatedly in an effort to get out from under the accusations, suggesting that he did, in fact, do what Christine Ford said he did.

Even short of that, however, his lies are disqualifying in and of themselves. He's a lawyer. He's a judge. He's poised to become one of the nine most powerful jurists in the nation. A single lie about even a trivial matter under oath would place any attorney's license in jeopardy and say damning things about his credibility and ethics as an attorney. Multiple lies from a man who wishes to serve on the Supreme Court are inexcusable and would, at any other time in out nation's history, ensure the failure of his nomination.

Yet Kavanaugh will likely be confirmed. He will be confirmed because Republicans do not care that he lied. They do not care about anything other than a political victory and control of the Supreme Court and they will countenance perjury and, it seems very likely, attempted rape, in order to get it.

I defy any person -- especially any lawyer -- to make a case for Brett Kavanaugh's credibility and fitness to be a Supreme Court justice in light of his lies and, yes, his perjury. I defy them to do it without reference to broad political talking points, ends-justify-the-means rationalizations and tu quoque reasoning. I do not think it can be done. At least not if one is being intellectually honest. Even the Republicans with whom I engage on social media and who, normally, will make an effort to argue that white is black until the position is no longer tenable are not even making the effort, likely because they know they cannot do so.

You will likely get your Supreme Court justice, Republicans. But you are getting it at the price of your soul. And you are certainly getting it at the cost of my respect for you. Now and forever going forward.

Most people will watch the Brett Kavanaugh hearing today in order to see whether Christine Ford or Kavanaugh is more believable as they testify about the alleged sexual assault that has led us here. As they weigh the witnesses' credibility, they should remember that they need not rely solely on the "he said, she said" aspects of all of this.

Brett Kavanaugh's boyhood friend, Mark Judge, was named by Christine Ford as an eye-witness to the alleged sexual assault. If what Kavanaugh and all of his supporters says is true, and that it did not happen, Mark Judge should be able to DESTROY Christine Ford's testimony, corroborate Kavanaugh's testimony and end this definitively. He should be able to say "yes, I read what Dr. Ford said about this, but it is simply untrue. This never happened." It would constitute at least some -- perhaps a lot of -- corroboration for his denial.

Instead, Judge literally went into hiding and the GOP is refusing to subpoena him.

This is a farce. it is an instructive and illuminating farce, but the outcome is preordained. Republican Senators will listen to Christine Ford today, but they will not hesitate to confirm Brett Kavanaugh because they do not think that backing an attempted rapist is as bad as not getting their first choice confirmed to the Supreme Court before Election Day.

On Saturday the University of North Carolina football team will host the Pitt Panthers in their home opener, kicking off the Tar Heels’ 92nd season in Kenan Memorial Stadium in Chapel Hill. Almost none of the 40,000+ fans who will show up have any idea who the stadium is named after, and even those who think they do probably have it wrong.

Almost all things Kenan at UNC are named after chemist, industrialist and developer William Rand Kenan Jr., an 1894 UNC graduate who, after teaming up with his brother-in-law, the oil man Henry Flagler, built railroads and made a fortune developing Miami and the Florida coast. When he died in 1965 he bequeathed most of his $95 million fortune to his alma mater. Today the trust that bears his name is worth over $300 million.

The football stadium is not named after William Rand Kenan Jr., however. Rather, at his request, and following a generous donation, it was named after his parents, William Rand Kenan Sr. and Mary Hargrave Kenan. It is they, according to a plaque affixed to a freestanding monument inside the stadium, who Kenan Memorial Stadium is intended to memorialize and continues to memorialize to this day.

Most fans entering Kenan Stadium probably don’t pay much attention to the plaque and, as a result, don’t know the first thing about William Rand Kenan Sr. Even if they did read it, though, they would not learn the most notable thing about him.

William Rand Kenan Sr. was the commander of a white supremacist paramilitary force which massacred scores of black residents of Wilmington, North Carolina on a single, bloody day in 1898.

Men gather outside the burned remains of Wilmington's black-owned newspaper, The Daily Record -- Library of Congress

Philadelphia Times, November 14, 1898

For nearly a century the events which took place in Wilmington on November 10, 1898 were known as “The Wilmington Race Riot.” That very name, however, was a lie intended to obscure what really happened.

Long portrayed as a violent uprising of black instigators put down by heroic and noble white citizens fighting for law and order, it was, in fact, a massacre. It was simultaneously a coup d’etat in which a white militia, led by a former Confederate officer and a white supremacist named Alfred Moore Waddell, killed black residents in the streets and in their homes, chased even more out of town, burned black-owned businesses to the ground and overthrew the local government, led by blacks and their white Republican allies in a coalition born of the briefly-ascendent Fusion Movement, which had just been legitimately elected.

History has tended to portray the massacre as spontaneous. It was anything but. It was preceded by months of racial and political tensions, stoked by red shirt-wearing white supremacist Democrats who were aggrieved that in Wilmington, then North Carolina’s largest city, a Fusion government sought to protect the gains freed blacks had earned during Reconstruction. ​On election day in 1898 the red shirts attempted to steal ballots and drive black voters away from polling places. Those efforts failed and the black-Republican coalition held power.

​That night a group of over 450 white men met at the courthouse and signed a so-called “White Declaration of Independence” which specifically called for the repeal of black voting rights and the banishment of black political and business leaders from the town. The following morning signatories to the Declaration burned the offices of the Wilmington Daily Record, — the town’s black-owned newspaper — to the ground and threatened its publisher with lynching. The massacre, planned out in advance and undertaken with deliberation, had begun.

History has likewise portrayed the violence in Wilmington that day as being carried out by an unruly mob. This is also a lie. The massacre was an organized paramilitary action in which the Wilmington Light Infantry, a state militia unit which had just returned from duty in the Spanish–American War, spread out over the city, taking it over street by street, killing black citizens in the process.

The most intimidating — and the most deadly — component of the Wilmington Light Infantry was was its machine gun squad, which commanded a rapid-firing Colt gun mounted on a horse-drawn wagon. The gun, capable of firing 420 .23 caliber rounds a minute, was not property of the United States Army or the state militia. Rather, it was purchased by local businessmen who, according to contemporary accounts,believed that the gun would “intimidate into quietude” those who saw the weapon and “overawe Negroes.” The machine gun squad was likewise itself not a military force. It was led by a Civil War veteran and local businessmen named William Rand Kenan Sr., with other local business owners under his command.

The bloodshed began when foot soldiers shot and killed blacks who had gathered on the street following the burning of the Daily Record’s offices. The massacre grew much deadlier when Kenan’s machine gun wagon crossed the Fourth Street Bridge into the predominantly black part of Wilmington known as Brooklyn. Its first fusillade came in response to what witnesses claimed to be sniper fire, though no sniper was ever found. According to eye-witnesses, the gun’s volley killed 25 blacks in a matter of seconds. Later, as Kenan’s machine gun squad proceeded past an area known as Manhattan Park, it was witnessed firing into a house where three black residents were killed. The gun was later used to threaten black churches into opening their doors to be searched for weapons whites believed blacks to be stockpiling and individuals white leaders deemed to be dangerous or subversive. No weapons were found but many black residents were marched out of hiding. Some were thrown in jail. Some were never seen again.

As the morning wore on, Kenan’s forces and other units of the Wilmington Light Infantry conducted house-to-house searches, intimidating residences into compliance, arresting blacks by the dozens and shooting those who gave even the slightest hint that they might resist. Some blacks who were specifically identified as influential in the community were hunted down and killed. As shots rang out, hundreds of black men, women and children fled town, some permanently, some to take shelter in nearby cemeteries and swamps until the violence subsided. By sundown, buildings in Wilmington’s black neighborhoods were pockmarked with bullet holes and anywhere from 60 to as many as 300 blacks had been killed. The exact number is lost to history due to white leaders’ hasty burial of bodies in mass graves and due to black witnesses either having fled town or having been intimidated into silence.

The next morning white leaders, with the backing of the Wilmington Light Infantry, forced the Republican Mayor, the board of aldermen, and the police chief to resign at gunpoint after which they and black leaders which had not been killed or who had not fled were marched to the train station and forced to leave the state under armed guard. That same day Alfred Moore Waddell — the white supremacist leader who orchestrated the events which led to the massacre — was named mayor, an office he would hold until 1905. The coup d’etat completed.

Within a year of the massacre the North Carolina legislature — determined to prevent blacks from holding political power like they did for a time in Wilmington — passed a new constitution which made it close to impossible for blacks to register to vote and imposed poll taxes and literacy tests that effectively disfranchised black voters completely. Nearly every other southern state would model laws on these North Carolina statutes. The “Solid South” of the Jim Crow era was secured and would remain in place, officially, until the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Unofficially, efforts to discourage blacks from voting continue to this day.

William Rand Kenan Sr. was hailed as a hero for his role in the massacre. The white-owned Wilmington Messenger newspaper lauded the Wilmington Light Infantry and Kenan personally, writing “[i]n the Revolutionary War, in the Civil War and in this race war, a Kenan was the bravest of the brave.” A few weeks after the massacre it was reported that Kenan held a massive barbecue for all of those who participated, after which the assembled men gave Kenan a vote of thanks for his service in the massacre. In February 1903 Kenan was named to the University of North Carolina's Board of Trustees. He died two months later.

​For the next several decades the Wilmington Massacre was invariably branded a "riot," "insurrection," "rebellion," "revolution," or "conflict," necessitated by an unlawful uprising of black aggressors, with the violence of it all dramatically downplayed, distorted or cast as unavoidable. A typical example of this can be seen in Incidents by the Way, the 1958 memoir of William Rand Kenan Jr., the UNC benefactor, who wrote of his father’s actions thusly:

“As a small boy I was much impressed with the following: There was a riot of colored men in Wilmington and my father organized a company of men with all kinds of rifles together with a riot gun on a wagon and they cleaned up the riot very quickly, although they were compelled to kill several persons. My father rode the wagon and directed the operation.” ​​

​William Rand Kenan Jr. was, in fact, 26 years-old at the time and was working as a chemist for Union Carbide. He was almost certainly well-aware of the circumstances of the massacre and likely distorted the timeline of it, casting himself, erroneously, as a “small boy,” in order to distance himself and his family from its horrors as time passed.

It is highly unlikely that any of the thousands of football fans who come to Kenan Stadium each fall or any of the dozens of young men who play for the Tar Heels — a great many of whom are black — are aware of the infamy of the stadium’s namesake. Indeed, even those most familiar with the university and its connection to the Kenans know little if anything about it.

“The Kenans are an enormously generous family of benefactors to the University of North Carolina. Everybody knows that,” UNC history professor Harry Watson told me when I interviewed him recently. “The average undergraduate would say ‘oh, yeah, the Kenans, they’re a pretty important family who have given us a lot of money’ but the biographical details are not likely well known as even that,” Watson said. “Kenan Sr.’s role in the violence of 1898 is not widely known at all.”

“There are probably a couple of people on campus who know,” said UNC history Professor William Sturkey, who specializes in the history of Jim Crow and the New South. “I think a lot of people would be quite shocked. It’s just something that’s been buried and forgotten.”

It’s not the first thing that has been buried and forgotten about the history of the Kenans.

A plaque on Kenan Memorial Stadium refers to the Kenan family's wealth as coming from “chemicals, power, railroads and hotels.” That is true so far as William Rand Kenan Jr.’s adult fortune was concerned, but the Kenans were already wealthy thanks to plantation slavery. Indeed, according to an 1850 slave census, the Kenan family owned 49 people, including 23 people aged 10 or under. This would be the household in which William Rand Kenan Sr., who manned the gun in Wilmington and for whom the stadium was named, was raised.

“[Slaves’] presence and their lives were omitted. And not just omitted, but intentionally omitted.” Sturkey said. He said that, via his motion, he was suggesting that the Faculty Athletics Committee ask the athletic department to “take steps to recognize the existence of these people whose lives were so crucial to compiling the wealth which built the university . . . it was about simply telling the truth and not misleading people.”

Sturkey’s motion was unanimously passed but it has not been acted upon and the athletic department has given no reason why it has not done so. Not that the athletic department would be the first department which has chosen to ignore the slaveholding history of the Kenans. Over at the Kenan-Flagler Business school website there there appears a timeline of the Kenan family's history. It conspicuously jumps from 1793 to the 1880s, with no mention whatsoever of what the Kenan family was doing, and how it was making its money, during the intervening years.

“Kenan is a name that’s all over our campus, but in terms of how we’ve approached history, we’ve let the greatest benefactors tell their own history,” Sturkey said. “But by doing that, of course, we’ve allowed them to have the complete say in what that history is.”

​Based on recent events at UNC, it would appear that, if the Kenans and the university continue to insist upon complete say in how history is told, they will do so at their peril.

Yellowspacehopper at English Wikipedia

Like so many other places in the south, North Carolina is no stranger to the ongoing controversy surrounding memorials and monuments of the Confederate and Jim Crow eras. It is unique, however, in not only its opposition to doing much if anything about them, but in its affirmative protection of such monuments.

For 105 years, a statue called “Silent Sam” sat on a prominent quad on UNC’s campus, facing the main street which passes the university. While ostensibly intended to commemorate the Civil War and its fallen soldiers, Silent Sam, like so many other Confederate monuments erected in the late 19th and early 20th century, was in fact a monument to the Jim Crow Era. If there was any doubt of this, one need only read the speech given by industrialist, philanthropist, and white supremacist Julian Carr at Silent Sam’s dedication ceremony in 1913.

Carr, who advocated for taking voting rights away from blacks and who referred to the Wilmington Massacre as “a grand and glorious event” after it occurred, did not mince words on the afternoon Silent Sam was dedicated. He talked openly, and with no small amount of pride, about how Confederate soldiers saved “the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South,” adding, “to-day, as a consequence the purest strain of the Anglo Saxon is to be found in the 13 Southern States — Praise God.” He added that, in the days after the end of the Civil War he had, on the very spot where the statue now stood, “horse-whipped” a “negro wench” for speaking disrespectfully to a white woman. Given how it was spoken of at its very dedication, there is no question that the statue was not intended to memorialize fallen soldiers but, instead, to stand as a monument to white supremacy.

Silent Sam had been a source of controversy for years, but in the wake of 2017’s Unite the Right march in Charlottesville which, among other things, cast more light on Confederate and Jim Crow-era monuments, protests had increased significantly. The university listened to protesters’ arguments but claimed it could do nothing about Silent Sam because its hands were legally tied.

Not that those laws are the only thing motivating UNC officials and donors. Some seem quite eager to protect monuments to the Confederacy and Jim Crow on their own terms.

Last month a series of emails were leaked and published in which one member of the UNC Board of Trustees called for cameras with night vision to be installed around Silent Sam in order to protect it and called protesters “criminals” and “entitled wimps”who should be arrested as a deterrence measure. In another email the university’s Vice Chancellor referred to university leadership’s interest in “preserving a piece of our history,” and defending the statue from “outside parties” who may protest it. Wealthy donors threatened to withhold six-figure contributions to UNC if Silent Sam was removed, with one calling protestors “spoiled intellectuals.” Whether it was because of that direct pressure and the interests of UNC officials in protecting the statue, or whether it was because university bylaws and the state law prevented them from taking action, in early August the UNC Board of Governors announced it had no plans to remove Silent Sam.

​If UNC officials thought that would be the end of the matter, they were sorely mistaken. In the wake of the decision to take no action, protests intensified. On the evening of August 20 — the night before the fall semester began — hundreds of protesters gathered around the statue, threw ropes around it and, in less than ten seconds, brought Silent Sam crashing to the ground. What was left of Silent Sam was taken to a university warehouse in the back of a dump truck. His fate is as of yet unknown, but at the moment the University seems intent on re-erecting the Jim Crow relic.

Photo courtesy of Kendy Smith

While a statue can be toppled, a 60,000-seat football stadium cannot be razed by a few hundred protesters. Unlike what has happened with troublesomely-named buildings and monuments at Duke University, the University of California at Berkeley and what will soon happen at Stanford University, it cannot be removed or renamed, at least without the sort of political and legal action which no one in a position to do so seems at all willing to undertake. Which leaves UNC -- which did not return a call or email seeking comment -- in a precarious position. Indeed, the university would seem to have only two choices.

The first choice would be to acknowledge the role of William Rand Kenan Sr. in theWilmington Massacre and to find a way, via additional plaques or interpretive materials, to tell the full history of that dark chapter of the Kenan family. In so doing it might, as Professor Sturkey suggested, begin to recognize the totality of the history upon which UNC was built and begin to remember those who have been intentionally erased from that history. Given the Silent Sam pushback and based on how even a modest motion to amend the misleading historical plaque about the Kenan family at the stadium was already ignored, it seems unlikely that the university would do such a thing.

Which would leave the only alternative: to do nothing. To continue to bury the history of its stadium’s namesake and his role in one of the darkest atrocities of the Jim Crow era, thereby allowing the largest and most prominent building on campus to memorialize a man who should, by all rights, stand in infamy.

Will the university do nothing? Better yet, will the people who toppled Silent Sam and those who supported them stand idly by if it does?​

The short version: during a drunken high school party, Kavanaugh allegedly caught her in a room, held her down and attempted to take her clothes off in what was likely an effort to have sex with her. An effort which would've been rape, because Blasey Ford did not consent. Indeed, she claims that she tried to fight off Kavanaugh and tried to scream, but that he placed his hand over her mouth to prevent her from doing so. Thankfully, however, she managed to escape in part due to Kavanaugh's drunken state and the drunken state of one of his friends who was also in the room. The incident has traumatized Blasey Ford for years, she says, and she suffered from post traumatic stress disorder. Kavanaugh and the other man who was allegedly in the room at the time deny the accusations completely.

Now that Blasey Ford's story is out, you will hear a few things, over and over again, from Republicans and those who want him to be confirmed: ​

"He denies it"

"It was a long time ago"; and

"There were no criminal charges."

Those things are all true. But they also don't matter when a lawyer or a judge is involved. The bar is nowhere near that low.

All lawyers, before being admitted to the bar, are subject to a test of "character and fitness." This involves background checks and interviews. If you do not pass your "character and fitness" test, you are not admitted to the practice of law.

The thing about the character and fitness test is that it specifically deals with stuff that happened a long time ago, before you were a lawyer. It often deals with stuff that never resulted in criminal charges. It does not matter if you denied, because the test is your candor. Indeed, someone who has been arrested and has gone to jail and has done their time, has atoned and is frank about it all has a BETTER chance of being admitted to the bar than someone who wasn't charged with anything but offers sketchy denials when asked about a given incident that had otherwise gone un-investigated.

(It's probably also worth noting that a history of financial irresponsibility is a relevant subject of inquiry and that getting into non-criminal financial trouble in such a way that raises questions about your judgment can also keep you from getting your law license. That could also be relevant for Kavanaugh too, but we'll let that go for the time being)

The key to all of this is that the test -- contrary to what Republicans will say for the next few days -- is not "his word against hers" or how long ago it was or whether there was anything criminal that arose from it. It's about his character. It's about his candor. It's about his integrity.

That's a high bar, not a low one. And it's that high a bar SIMPLY TO GET YOUR LAW LICENSE. Now think about how high that bar should be to get, literally, the highest possible legal job in existence: Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

Non-lawyers may think it's silly or overstating things, but lawyers know: if bar examiner had been made aware of these allegations when Kavanaugh graduated law school, he would have, at the very least, been subject to greater investigation on the matter. Depending on how he answered those questions -- if he was evasive or incomplete in his answers, even if he stuck to his denial -- he may have had his license withheld. People have had that happen to them for far less.

Against that backdrop, it is not at partisan to say that the allegations against Kavanaugh should, at the very least, result in far more inquiry and questioning of him. It should also go without saying that, if he sticks to what are starting to become less-than-satisfying or less-than-illuminating denials, he shouldn't be confirmed.

It's not partisan to say this because the standards to which all lawyers are held are directly invoked here. It is a matter for his chosen profession which, the reputation of lawyers notwithstanding, demands high moral and ethical character of its practitioners.

To become the next Justice of the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh should be obligated to show that he has cleared that considerable bar.

This story was originally written for Bloomberg BusinessWeek over the summer. Instead of running it they turned it into a highly-truncated cartoon thing that, being honest, was pretty darn clever and probably more appropriate for the subject matter than a 3,000-word story.

Still, I'd like to have the words I wrote for it all preserved someplace, so here they are.

​On March 11, 2015, an anonymous tip was texted to the Franklin County Kentucky Sheriff’s Department that Gilbert “Toby” Curtsinger, a longtime employee of the Buffalo Trace distillery had some stolen barrels of bourbon on his property. A search warrant was executed and deputies drove out to Curtsinger’s house on a winding country road west of Frankfort. Stolen bourbon is not unusual in bourbon country, but Franklin County Sheriff Pat Melton believed that this tip was about something more than your typical bootlegger. He believed that it might be leading him to the Pappy Van Winkle Bandit.

If you’re even a casual consumer of bourbon, chances are you’ve heard of Pappy Van Winkle. It’s the rarest of the many varieties of bourbon made by the Buffalo Trace Distillery and, indeed, the rarest bourbon variety of them all. Pappy, as it is known colloquially, is extraordinarily hard to find. Just 8,000 barrels are produced each year, compared to the millions of barrels of mass market brands like Jim Beam or its Tennessee cousin, Jack Daniel’s. Bar patrons pay upwards of $100 for a single pour. Aficionados who are lucky enough to win lotteries for the privilege of buying it at retail snap up bottles for as much as $300. Those not so fortunate, but who still want the stuff, routinely pay thousands for a bottle on the black market.

​On October 15, 2013 Buffalo Trace reported that a little over 200 bottles of Pappy, with a market value of around $26,000, had gone missing. Sheriff Melton characterized it as a “heist,” and characterized the stolen product as “The Mac Daddy” of bourbon. The theft made international headlines, with bourbon enthusiasts inside and outside of the industry speculating about who did it, marveling at the audaciousness of it all and, perhaps, wondering if the theft made it more or less likely that they themselves could get their hands on a bottle. When that tip came in, pointing a finger at a man who had inside access to the place where Pappy was born, Sheriff Melton believed he was about to crack the bourbon crime of the century.

I think it is a moral requirement to make money when you can . . . to sell the product for the highest price . . . I agree with Martin Shkreli that when he raised the price of his drug he was within his rights because he had to reward his shareholders. If he’s the only one selling it, then he can make as much money as he can. This is a capitalist economy, and if you can’t make money, you can’t stay in business.

All y'all who think that you're not paying for that 400% price increase because it's not coming in the form of a tax increase don't understand how economics work. All y'all who think nationalized healthcare is godless socialism are on this guy's side.

Hunter S. Thompson had long since lost his fastball by 9/11. Within three and a half years he'd be dead. But what he wrote on 9/12/01 -- like so much of what he wrote when the stakes were truly high -- was dead on the fucking money.

​The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country.

Make no mistake about it: We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives . . . It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerrilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy . . .

. . . We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once . . .[George W. Bush] will declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why. If the guilty won't hold up their hands and confess, he and the Generals will ferret them out by force . . .

​When Donald Trump became a credible political figure in the run-up to the 2016 election a lot of Republicans tried to distance themselves from him. For months the line was that he wasn't really a Republican. He didn't believe in Republican principles and policies, so he couldn't be. Some Republicans I know even claimed he was actually a Democrat conducting some sort of false flag operation or something. Imagine.

Their opposition to Trump was ineffective, of course. Trump won the Republican nomination and won the presidency. Almost immediately thereafter basically every single Republican official and the vast majority of the Republican Party gave Trump their full support in every way that truly matters. Oh, they claim they oppose him, but they don't in any practical or concrete way.

In reality, they have chosen to ride the Trump tiger to get the tax cuts, deregulation and activist conservative judges they wanted, while doing whatever they could to protect the GOP brand in the process. They disclaim responsibility for Trump's worst excesses -- his corruption, his recklessness and, in many cases, his evil -- but that disclaimer of responsibility has been wholly unconvincing. It amounts to little more than superficially turning up their nose at Trump's worst excesses while, simultaneously, doing absolutely nothing to rein him in or to exercise oversight, all the while pushing back against anyone who suggested they actually should.

This week Republicans' performative -- and only performative -- opposition to Donald Trump reached new depths.

While some have lauded this anonymous person for their bravery or are happy that someone is working to destabilize and undermine an administration they loathe, there is nothing to be happy about in all of this and there is no bravery present in this anonymous person's words or acts. Quite the opposite in fact. What they are doing -- assuming they are telling the truth -- is both terrible for our country and cowardly in the extreme.

If, as the op-ed writer implies, one thinks Trump is literally unfit to govern, the 25th Amendment to the Constitution and the procedures it specifies for taking power away from an incapacitated president is how you remedy that. If, rather than doing that, you simply work behind the scene to thwart an incapacitated president's will, you are committing something akin to an administrative coup. You are undermining democratic legitimacy. I hate Trump and every single thing he stands for, but I believe democratic legitimacy and governing by duly-elected public officials matters more than just about anything. Just as we should not have had Woodrow Wilson's wife running the country after he had a stroke or Ronald Reagan's cabinet executing their own plans when, as some have suggested, he began to suffer from the early symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, we cannot stand idly by while anonymous appointees make their own decisions about how America should be governed.

My suspicion, however, is that our anonymous op-ed writer does not believe that Trump is actually incapacitated or unfit for office. Rather, I believe they simply are looking to provide cover for themselves and other Republicans by distancing themselves from Trump. They're setting themselves up so that, later, when Trump finally and definitively crashes and burns, they can walk away from the wreckage without taking any responsibility for it whatsoever. "Hey, we were never really with him, so we cannot be held responsible for our complicity in his reign of incompetent terror now. Vote GOP in 2022!"

All of which is utter bullshit, of course. For the past two years Republicans have stood idly by, and in some cases have been wholly complicit, as Trump has disgraced America and the office of the presidency. They've done so to get rich, to get their taxes cut and to get the conservative judges and the other goodies they've long wanted. The alpha and omega of their true displeasure with Trump is the degree to which he has hampered the electoral prospects of other Republicans. They deny this, but their actions speak louder than their words. There are a host of ways in which Republicans could have worked to curb Trump's excesses and police his crimes, but they have undertaken none of them. I suspect that they believe doing so might imperil their access to more riches and more tax cuts. When it came time to choose between the health of the republic and their particular political goals, they chose the latter.

Which brings us back to our anonymous op-ed writer. If this person truly believes that their first duty is to our country and if they truly believe that Trump is a threat to the Republic -- and if, as is likely, Trump could not, ultimately be removed from office as unfit -- they should resign in very loud, very public protest. They should work against Trump and the danger to the republic they claim he poses. They should subordinate their comparatively insignificant desires for more tax cuts, more deregulation and even more conservative judges to the good of the nation, which they themselves claim is at risk.

They won't do that, though, because they want to have it both ways. They want to continue to get all of those policy goodies that having Donald Trump in office has given them while not taking any responsibility or political heat for the damage he is doing. They want to cover their asses, skate away from the consequences and, later, when they get their inevitable book deal or start collecting fat checks on the lecture circuit, to claim that they were, in reality, on the side of the angels all along.

We should not and must not allow that to happen.

As a friend observed to me this morning, when Trump is finally out of office -- be he voted out or forced out in ignominy -- we must never forget that, when faced with an amoral, unethical danger as president -- a threat to the republic, to use their own words -- Republicans grabbed as much money and power as they could and did nothing to stop him apart from offer empty words. We must remember that they are complicit and that their claims to be in opposition to Trump -- present since he burst on the political scene -- are phony and that their actions and, more notably, their inaction, of the past two years inextricably link them with Donald Trump. They should be similarly shamed.

Our anonymous op-ed writer is not a hero of the resistance. He's a collaborator looking to distance himself from his crimes. Treat him as such, both now and when his identity is inevitably revealed.

My daughter texted me from school today. She was in her freshman humanities class which is basically an English/social studies mashup. Anna texts me from school a lot. When she does so it's usually the best part of my day. Today, like most days, it was because she wanted to share something funny with me.

Today, however, my credentials and I were the butt of the joke:

Anna later explained that her teacher was not talking about me, my political science degree and my sports writing career specifically. Rather, she was just making a point about how, when you read something, you should be critical of the writer, who he or she is and what his or her background is. Today they happened to be discussing an article about the value of a liberal arts education and the teacher approvingly noted that its author had a history degree so, obviously, he knew what he was talking about. The crack about the political science degree-possessing sports writer was an imaginary horrible meant to portray a true ignoramus.

I won't lie: I was less than pleased about all of this. Not because I thought of it as some sort of personal attack, as I have never met her teacher and she doesn't know a thing about me or my career. And not because of the underlying lesson, as I agree it is vitally important to assess and be critical of one's information sources. Rather, I was pissed about how superficial a notion it is to look at a person's formal education to assess a person's credibility.

I've gone at length about my unconventional career path, but I'm not the only person doing something radically different than their college transcript might suggest they'd one day do. My father grew up working on cars at his father's taxi cab company and wanted to work on jet engines one day but, due to a typographical error by the United States Navy, wound up in meteorology school and spent the next 40 years as a weather man. Anna's mother has a degree in French but has spent the past 23 years working in the office furniture business. My best friend from college has an M.A. in history but has nonetheless spent most of the past 20 years working at technology companies in Silicon Valley. I'm sure all of us know many people who have careers that are completely unrelated to whatever it was they studied in college and who can speak as authorities on those topics regardless of what they happened to major in back in the day.

My displeasure with what I heard today was not, however, simply about a teacher who does not seem to appreciate that career paths are often crooked. It's about her seeming not to appreciate the value of a crooked career path in and of itself.

I am not exactly a typical or a popular figure in the baseball writing world. When I began this job a decade ago it was pretty unusual for a large media company like NBC to give someone with no journalism experience the kind of platform I have. One used to pay their dues for years, serving time as an agate guy, a high school football stringer, a backup beat writer and then, maybe, if everything broke right, they could be a columnist, which is roughly equivalent to what I do. I jumped the line. I had never been part of the baseball writing fraternity. What's more, my writing tends to skew pretty sharp and critical and includes a lot of media criticism as well so, while I have made many friends in the business over the years, I'm still not welcome in the club. If my credentials had been in order -- if I had gone to journalism school and if I had written game stories for the Des Moines Register or the Sacramento Bee -- I'd likely be invited to more meetings and parties.

But I'd probably also not have this job.

NBC was late to the online sports game and, when they launched my website, they wanted to make up for lost time. They did so not by aping what everyone else had done ten years earlier, but by making some noise. They hired a lawyer to be their football writer and, with that precedent set, hired one to be their baseball writer too. Our lack of a journalism background and our willingness to say and do whatever the hell we wanted to was a feature, not a bug, and nearly a decade later it's still working pretty well. It's working well, I'd argue, precisely because neither Mike Florio nor I approach our job like someone who went to J-school would and because, as such, we give readers something they can't get anywhere else. Our lack of traditional qualifications for our job were strengths, not weaknesses. NBC's hiring people with unconventional resumes helped them solve a problem they likely could not have solved (i.e. catching up with their competitors quickly) if they had done the conventional thing.

A couple of lawyers with liberal arts backgrounds are not alone in that, of course. There are a lot of people who contribute to society in ways far more important than writing about sports despite the fact that they are not doing what they had set out to do back in college. There are companies being run by people without business degrees, artists who never went to art school, musicians who never had lessons, and tons and tons of people making a difference in the world despite the fact that they simply fell into jobs adjacent to -- or often not adjacent to -- the disciplines they initially set out to pursue.

That's true even of the guy who wrote the article about the value of a liberal arts education they were discussing in my daughter's class today. The guy who was deemed OK by Anna's teacher because he had a history degree. His name is David Brooks. He's a columnist for the New York Times who didn't spend a day in journalism school and who hasn't spent a minute pursuing the academic study of history since he graduated from the University of Chicago 35 years ago.

There's probably a lesson in there someplace. If Anna doesn't learn it at school, I'll make a point to talk to her about it separately. I think I can do it too, despite the fact that I didn't study education.

I took my kids to Cleveland for the Orioles-Indians game on Friday night. They’re not really big baseball fans, but they like going to games. Partially because it’s fun and there’s junk food, but mostly because it provides them a new venue for the sort of savage and absurdist commentary for which Gen-Z kids are quickly becoming famous.

I’ve watched this from a front row seat for a couple of years now. Anyone who follows me on Twitter is familiar with how brutally my daughter Anna, 14, owns me via text messages (and some old timers around here may remember her greatest hits from WAY back in the day). Others who follow me know how deeply into absurdist and envelope-pushing meme culture my son, Carlo, 13, happens to be. Every day is a new, eye-opening adventure. I’m impressed by the level of savagery they’re capable of in their early teens and terrified at what they’re going to capable of once they reach adulthood.

I’m likewise suffering from no small amount of whiplash. I mean, I once thought my fellow Gen-Xers and I had perfected ironic emotional detachment and that whole “whatever, nothing matters anyway” stance. I also thought that a decade’s worth of Millennials restoring an earnestness and emotional honesty to the lexicon of our nation’s youth — the likes of which we haven’t seen for probably 60 or 70 years — had all but buried that jaded sentiment once and for all.

Nope. The Gen-Z kids are going to stomp on the Millennials’ throats and pour acid all over their hopes, dreams and pretensions of an earnest and hopeful world. Then they’ll laugh mockingly at the Gen-Xers as we’re exposed for the amateurs that we are, and will rhetorically kill us, like some warrior coming back to vanquish their sensei. The only saving grace is that whatever Boomers are still left as this happens will just die of shock and outrage. Gen-Z will not be attending their funerals either unless they need some pics of dead grandpa for a devastating meme or two (Carlo has already told my father that he’s going to meme him once he passes away; my father does not quite know what to make of that, mostly because he’s 74 and does not know what a meme is).

Anyway, I’ve blocked out most of what they had to say during the game as a means of psychological self-defense, but trust me when I say that it was three straight hours of running commentary at turns hilarious, frightening and truly disturbing in ways that are hard to pin down. I do, however, remember or have documentation of a few things that went down in between the hot dogs and bon mottes:

My son is well aware of my Chief Wahoo stance and, thankfully, agrees with it. Nevertheless, he kept threatening to say “my dad said you’re a racist” to everyone who was wearing Wahoo gear because he said it’d be fun to see what happened. Which, given that he’s basically an agent of chaos — here’s a video of him in action— was a fairly plausible threat. Thankfully he did not do it;

My daughter said to my son that Orioles’ outfielder Joey Rickard looked like “that kid Kyle, in your grade.” My son agreed. For the rest of the game, every time Rickard came up, they yelled “don’t mess up, Kyle!” Rickard went 0-for-4 with two strikeouts and all the way home they would fill silences with “Dammit, Kyle” and shake their heads after which they’d laugh hysterically. They then said that, at school today, they were going to tell Kyle he sucked but not tell him why. I think it’s 50/50 that they do it; and

Slider, the Indians’ mascot came up to our section. This is a screencap from my daughter’s Snapchat:

​All of that being said, I don’t want you to get the impression that Anna and Carlo’s entire existence is savage owns and joking and ironic detachment. They are actually smart, sweet and sensitive kids who, when they’re not joking around, possess more empathy for their fellow humans than most adults who have seen and experienced far more than they have do. I am proud of my kids for that. Truly proud. Indeed I worry that the jaded exterior I’ve been describing is a defensive perimeter they and their generation have been forced to erect because the generations which came before them have thrown so much fear into their world and, perhaps, are even ruining it before my kids get a chance to live in it as adults. That’s a lot to put on anyone, but the fact that we’ve put that sort of weight on our children is a tragedy. Knowing that the’ll have to cope with what we have done to make their lives harder and, quite possibly, shorter, breaks my heart.

Those thoughts were swirling around my head as the game neared its end Friday evening. As they did, I looked over to Carlo and Anna sitting next to me. They were watching the game intently. And, even though it had started raining, quite contently. They seemed happy. The cynicism and the wiseguy routines had been left back in the middle innings somewhere. When Cody Allen struck out Kyle, er, I mean Joey Rickard, for the game’s final out, they both stood up and cheered a genuine and exuberant cheer. When they did, I figured it was a good opportunity for some rare heartfelt sincerity.

“So, Baseball. You like it, eh?” I said in my proudest dad voice, thinking that, just maybe, we had bonded over something near and dear to my heart. Anna looked at me and smiled. Then she said something I’ll never forget.

​“Not really. But I guess I sort of have to respect it because if it wasn’t for baseball you’d be unemployed and I’d probably be homeless.”

The special election was held tonight and, as I write this, it appears that the Democrat, Danny O'Connor, will not win. There are still uncounted provisional and mail-in ballots, but I suspect that will not be enough and that the Republican Troy Balderson will be declared the victor.

This is not the outcome I hoped for, but it is is not a bad result.

The GOP has held OH-12 for all but one term in the last 76 years. Since OH-12 was gerrymandered, the Republican has won with a margin of 27-40 points. In 2016, the district went 11 points in favor of Trump, 14 points to the right of the nation and the GOP congressional candidate won by nearly 40 points.

​Tonight, it appears, the Republican will win by a couple of points, max. That is a massive underperformance for the Republican, even when you account for the fact that the seat was open and even when you account for the fact that the GOP holds the presidency and it's an off-year election, which normally favors the opposition party. The fundamentals of this district -- again, massively gerrymandered to favor Republicans -- means that it should've been a cakewalk instead of the nail-biter that it was.

Some additional thoughts about this:

As you may remember -- and as you can see if you follow the links above -- I spent a lot of time last year talking about this race, along with my theory that an economic populist/pro-labor message was the key to winning a district like this one. O'Connor did not run that pro-labor/economic populist race. I'm not second-guessing that. He and his people had access to the data, talked to the voters and made the decisions. My stuff on that was merely speculative. As I wrote last night: it was a strong outcome, even in loss.

That said, turnout was high for an off-year, special election, but still rather pathetic in the grand scheme. I think you address that -- and thereby overcome the huge gerrymander disadvantage -- by engaging traditional non-voters and that the economic populism does that. As Alexandra Ocasio-Ortez said recently, “the swing voter is not red to blue. The swing voter is non voter to voter. That’s our swing voter.”

There is reason to believe that's who is necessary to engage in OH-12. I say this because, based on preliminary results, it appears that O'Connor was not turning red voters blue. Red voters stayed home. O'Connor ramped up turnout in the blue parts of OH-12 due to an excellent ground game led by motivated volunteers, but partisan lines generally weren't crossed. It was a motivation thing. What if new voters were engaged? Voters who, their personal and cultural dispositions aside, had never committed to being active partisan voters?

This is untestable I suspect. But I likewise suspect that there are thousands upon thousands of people in Licking, Morrow, Richland and Muskingum county -- and in Franklin county for that matter -- who never vote who might with a new message. A message that speaks to issues which politicians generally don't speak to and which reaches people who generally are not reached.

Again, I am not criticizing the O'Connor campaign in this regard. It was a good result even if the ultimate outcome was a loss. But I suspect that's the absolute limit a traditional Democrat can do in a place like OH-12 given the maximal motivation we saw on the Democratic side and the sorts of election dynamics which we are unlikely to see again any time soon. It was an admirable effort, but one which still fell short. It strikes me that, maybe, one needs a different message to match the admirable mobilization we saw and to break through in a district that has every other dynamic strongly stacked in Republicans' favor.

All that aside: for November, it means good things for Democrats nationwide. As of this writing, it appears that OH-12 will have seen around a a 13 point swing toward Democrats over and above the natural partisan lean of the seat. Nationwide, at the moment, it appears that things are swinging about 15 points to the Democrats. Based on those results, it all but ensures a blue wave in November.

I'm sad that the Democrat did not win, bit I am hopeful that this is a harbinger of a strong Democratic showing in November and, finally, a push back against the ruinous path on which Donald Trump and the Republican party has led this country for the past two years.